ARTICLES ABOUT PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS BY DATE - PAGE 2

A new marketing initiative between the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority and South Florida McDonald's restaurants will highlight tri-county mass transit programs. Themed "Enjoy the Freedom," the campaign encourages residents throughout South Florida to learn more about area mass transit at some 200 participating McDonald's locations. Patrons also can register for free McDonald's meals and free mass transit passes. The program was created by Bitner Goodman Public Relations, working with $141,000 in funding from the Florida Department of Transportation.

City commissioners have agreed to lease four acres to the West Broward YMCA in exchange for the organization providing recreation and social service programs for Weston residents. Commissioners last week unanimously approved the lease of land in the city-owned, 102-acre Broward County Regional Park for the YMCA's new center. Craig Drucker, chairman of the YMCA's board, said the fund-raising campaign for the $6.5 million, 40,000-square-foot facility, to be headed by restaurant owner Tim Robbie, should begin soon.

Developer R. Donohue Peebles and the Broward County Commission were at it again. The two sides squared off this week over the fate of the proposed convention center hotel, an idea that inched painstakingly closer toward reality. The exchange ended satisfactorily. Both the black developer from D.C. and the seven commissioners from Broward agreed to work out their differences for another stab at a final deal. Give credit to the commissioners. It took them four hours, but they didn't do anything rash.

It is a universal lament of the corporate community that most government agencies tend to be wasteful and inefficient because they aren't run "more like a business." The experience of Enterprise Florida, however, brings to mind another useful clich: "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." A public-private partnership created to attract industries and jobs to the state, Orlando-based Enterprise Florida receives 95 percent of its $25 million budget from taxes but is run by executives from the private sector rather than bureaucrats.

Florida's campaign to sail into the 21st century as "Hollywood East" on a wave of big-budget movie productions is sinking like the Titanic _ the ship, not the movie _ into a sea of financial and political chaos. The film marketing agency called the Florida Entertainment Industry Council is broke, owes $230,000 and its state funding has been frozen since early December by the Florida Department of Banking and Finance because of missed contract deadlines. The council is the first and, with an annual budget of $400,000, the smallest of the state's public-private partnerships.

`Eastward Ho!" is the evocative title of a promising plan to revitalize South Florida's partially blighted, underused and neglected eastern urban corridor. Planners want home and business developers to build there and want people to live and work there. The purpose: Reduce unrelenting westward growth pressure now imperiling the Everglades, the water supply and the region's future quality of life. The narrow 85-mile-long corridor runs from West Palm Beach to Miami, straddling I-95, between the Florida East Coast and CSX railroad lines.

WASHINGTON -- Mary Johnson speaks with all the confidence and acumen of a shrewd business professional when she talks about her plans to open an electronic billing service to process claim forms for doctors. "My computer will communicate with the insurance company`s computers by way of a modem, instead of going through the mail," she said. "This will make the payment process much speedier." But Johnson receives Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and welfare regulations cut off benefits to anyone with big assets, such as a computer, that are worth more than $1,000.

The opening of the $58 million Broward Center for the Performing Arts is a gratifying ending to a 25-year campaign by civic leaders, marked by political and economic setbacks, and a long-term feud among arts groups. Before 1984, efforts to rebuild or replace the aging War Memorial Auditorium in downtown Fort Lauderdale`s Holiday Park were consistently undermined by arguments among local music and theater groups over who would benefit most from a modern arts center. That, coupled with voters` traditional reluctance to subsidize any but the most essential public services, led to a series of landslide defeats at the polls from 1965 through 1982.